Now more than ever, businesses run on Information Technology (“IT”). In recent years, IT has expanded to cover an increasing number of business applications as well as vigorous year-over-year growth in storage—including email, graphics, audio, and video files that grow steadily in resolution and length. Protecting all of this information involves careful planning and management, and an important component in any comprehensive data-protection scheme includes data archiving.
Data archiving is the process of storing historical data and may be performed by a data archiving platform. An archiving platform may need to be able to interface with numerous underlying storage systems provided by various storage system vendors. Each storage system typically has its own proprietary interface, and archiving platform providers may need to include specific code for each storage system with which the archiving platform may communicate. Thus, creating and maintaining an archiving platform that supports the ever-increasing number of storage systems available on the market may be time-consuming and expensive. Some storage systems offer standardized protocol gateways (e.g., a CIFS gateway). However, using a standardized protocol gateway may result in increased costs, decreased scalability, and increased complexity.